Pope Benedict XVI has chosen a 71-year-old Italian cardinal as the new head of the Pontifical Council for the Family. Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, Archbishop of Florence since 2001, was appointed to the post last Saturday - just seven weeks after the death of 72-year-old Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, the controversial Colombian who had held the job for more than 17 years.
The change in leadership at the family office did not immediately suggest that there would be any significant shift in the Vatican's longstanding opposition to such things as artificial birth control, abortion or the use of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV/Aids. Nevertheless, given Cardinal Antonelli's reputation as a church moderate, the appointment hinted that the Holy See was ready to at least adopt a noticeably more congenial tone in addressing family- and life-related issues than it did under the combative Cardinal Trujillo.
"We must above all highlight what is positive [in the family]," Cardinal Antonelli told Vatican Radio the day he was named in the new post. But he then praised his late Colombian predecessor's "great passion" for the family and his "courage" in risking being unpopular through the stances he took.
Cardinal Antonelli has not caused great controversy in his own positions on family life. In a short and popular pastoral letter on the topic last year to people in the Archdiocese of Florence the cardinal offered a "decalogue" for the family that consisted of giving encouraging suggestions for helping married couples strengthen their relationships. His only negative words - and they were gentle - were against a "mentality that reduces love to the satisfaction of instinct, sensations and pleasant feelings" while ignoring the need for commitment and sacrifice.
That letter may one day be remembered as one of the few positive achievements in Cardinal Antonelli's seven-year legacy in the Tuscan archdiocese. He has found it increasingly difficult to administer the archdiocese after losing the confidence of some of his leading senior clergy and influential lay people who accused him of mishandling a highly publicised sex-abuse scandal in 2004 involving Fr Lelio Cantini, a charismatic elderly priest (The Tablet, 21 April 2007). When the cardinal merely transferred the accused priest - who was a close friend and mentor to the archdiocese's auxiliary bishop - several leading clerics went directly to the Vatican and succeeded in getting Fr Cantini suspended.
Many people believe that the powerful former president of the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) and soon to be retired Vicar of Rome, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, helped broker Cardinal Antonelli's appointment to the Vatican.
The then-Archbishop Antonelli was picked by Cardinal Ruini in 1995 to be the CEI secretary general. That was after Antonelli had served as bishop for six years in Gubbio and archbishop for six and a half years in Perugia. He was created a cardinal in 2003, two years after he arrived in Florence.